Joan Tronto and Virginia Held expanded care ethics from a moral psychology into a political theory. The central argument: the organization of care — who provides it, who receives it, who is exempted from it, who profits from it — is a political question, and the systematic devaluation of care is a structural feature of existing political arrangements, not an oversight.
Tronto identifies “moral boundaries” that insulate political theory from care: the boundary between morality and politics (which treats care as a private virtue rather than a public concern), the boundary between public and private life (which assigns care to the domestic sphere), and the “moral point of view” (which privileges abstract impartiality over situated attentiveness). These boundaries are not neutral — they protect existing distributions of power by keeping care invisible as a political issue.
The political stakes are concrete. Care work is disproportionately performed by women, people of color, migrants, and undocumented workers. It is among the lowest-paid labor in any economy, and often unwaged. Social reproduction theorists show that capital depends on this labor while systematically devaluing it. Care ethics demands that this arrangement be named as a political injustice rather than treated as a natural feature of the economy.
Held argues further that the justice/care divide — which assigns justice to the public sphere and care to the private — is itself an ideological construction. Care is not opposed to justice but is the wider framework within which justice operates. Formal equality without attention to the actual conditions of people’s lives produces procedural liberalism — governance through neutral procedures that obscure substantive inequalities.
The connection to late liberalism is direct: late liberal governance manages harm by acknowledging it procedurally without redressing it structurally. It “cares about” without “care-giving” — enacting exactly the split that Tronto’s four-phase model makes visible. The letters-to-the-web on care and control describe this dynamic in practice: governance that mistakes managed concern for care.